How Digital Sovereignty Will Lead to The Slow and Fast Erosion of The Internet
Sovereignty is not a synonym for autonomy; it is instead the uncompromising authority to impose a single will upon others.
“If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.” Hannah Arendt’s warning is more relevant today than ever. If we want a free, thriving, and global digital space, it is precisely sovereignty we must renounce.
The Islamic Republic’s recent near-total Internet blackout, cutting mobile networks, blocking core protocols, and reducing access to a fraction of the population, offers a stark reminder of what sovereignty over digital infrastructure looks like in practice. Sovereignty doesn’t give the people on the ground autonomy and control. Yet, there is a growing insistence from both civil society and governments that “sovereignty” should be the organizing principle of digital governance. This is not only misguided; it is actively harmful.
Sovereignty is the wrong lens for protecting end users’ unfettered access to the Internet and digital technologies since the Internet’s interoperability and global reach rely on the very interdependence that sovereignty seeks to dismantle. This is not a fate reserved for undemocratic regimes; democratic states that normalize sovereignty-first digital governance will ultimately reproduce the same technical capacities for control, restriction, and exclusion. In the face of this event, the contradictions of digital sovereignty become impossible to ignore.
The proliferation of “digital sovereignties” risks reproducing the very logic it seeks to escape. Arendt’s objection to sovereignty was not limited to its state-centric form; it was directed at sovereignty as such, understood as the aspiration to ultimate control, self-sufficiency, and decisional finality. Whether sovereignty is claimed by states, corporations, or communities, it presupposes a bounded subject entitled to decide for itself and, by extension, to exclude others.
The False Promises of Digital Sovereignty
According to scholars, the digital sovereignty movement began in the early 2000s and accelerated in recent years. It has become a conceptual dumping ground where experts and policymakers claim to have found a master solution to every problem plaguing the digital sphere. They even go so far as to consider Internet shutdowns as a justifiable form of sovereignty and a useful tool for fighting against Big Tech.
Proponents frame it as an encompassing framework that will deliver an ordered, regulated, and secure digital environment while simultaneously resolving issues of individual rights and freedoms, political and legal enforceability, fair economic competition, and, essentially, any other challenge one can imagine.
Critics who point out that this is either disguised protectionism, technological nationalism, or—in authoritarian contexts—infrastructure for repression are dismissed as a fringe minority resisting inevitable progress. In its report, the Internet Society highlights the problems digital sovereignty seeks to address: national security and the ability to enforce laws; economic self-determination; protecting rights and empowering citizens, users, and communities; and upholding societal norms and values.
In 2021, the head of the EU Council, Charles Michel, mentioned that digital sovereignty is not possible without strategic autonomy, which
“is about being able to make choices. We want greater autonomy and greater independence in an open and global environment. This means reducing our dependencies, to better defend our interests and our values. We want a more level playing field and more fairness in today’s globalised world.”
Hannah Arendt offers the essential critique of this movement: sovereignty is not a synonym for autonomy; it is instead the uncompromising authority to impose a single will upon others. In a world defined by plurality, as Arendt noted, “not one man, but men, inhabit the earth,” and thus sovereignty and freedom are structurally incompatible. For one entity to be truly sovereign, all others must submit.
Proponents of “democratic” digital sovereignty argue that their authority is distinct. They claim their assertions of control are benevolent because they are derived from the consent of the governed, designed to shield citizens from disinformation or corporate exploitation. This distinction is illusory. The mechanism of sovereignty remains the same regardless of the regime type: it necessitates viewing citizens not as independent agents capable of judgment, but as vulnerable subjects who must be curated, managed, and protected from “harmful” information.
When a democratic state asserts sovereign control over the information environment, it validates the tools of coercion. We have already witnessed the consequences: citizens in the UK, Germany, and the US face arrests, house raids, and suspended prison sentences for social media posts. While the judicial context differs from the authoritarian crackdowns in Iran or Russia, the foundational logic —that the State is the final arbiter of acceptable speech — is identical.
Liberal democracies cannot adopt an inherently dictatorial framework to engineer freedom. By treating the Internet as a territory to be conquered rather than a commons to be shared, democratic nations do not give autonomy to their citizens; they merely refine the machinery of control.
This danger is also evident in contemporary calls to reassert sovereign authority over platform governance through inherently authoritarian instruments. Proposals to mandate algorithmic intervention, ranking obligations, or content visibility controls that rely on precisely the same regulatory techniques, centralized oversight of speech distribution, compelled design changes, and enforcement-backed compliance are incompatible with individual autonomy and pluralistic public discourse (refer to this speech at the European Parliament for some of these claims).
The justification for this shift is often an unproven assumption about user vulnerability: that users are passively shaped, or even “brainwashed,” by algorithmic systems, and therefore incapable of exercising meaningful agency over what they consume online. This framing leaves little room for user autonomy or contestation, and instead positions sovereign intervention as a corrective authority over both platforms and users.
The recent Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty aims to put control back in users’ hands by asserting sovereignty. But instead of giving users control, sovereignty will take it away. Asserting sovereignty on the Internet normalizes coercive control over speech environments in the name of democratic protection, while reproducing the same logic of authority and sovereignty that has historically enabled censorship.
The Internet is a pluralistic system. This is not a myth. States have not yet been able to assert their full sovereignty. The Internet still depends on interdependence, coordination, shared standards, and mutual restraint. Its value lies precisely in the fact that no single actor—state or otherwise—can fully control it. To frame Internet and digital governance in terms of sovereignty misunderstands the very conditions that make the Internet function.
From this perspective, notions of digital sovereignty that are not state-centric do not resolve the structural problem Arendt identified; they merely redistribute sovereign claims across different actors. The emphasis on autonomy and control, even when motivated by resistance to surveillance capitalism or digital colonialism, risks displacing the idea that political freedom does not arise from sovereignty but from plurality, from action in concert, and from shared institutions that no single actor fully commands.
Framing these struggles in the language of sovereignty, therefore, risks narrowing them into competing claims of authority, rather than opening space for genuinely collective, non-exclusive forms of digital governance grounded in interdependence, mutual restraint, and rights that are not contingent on belonging, nationality, or ethnicity.
Digital Sovereignty Relies on Coercion
Sovereignty has historically been maintained not through consent, but through coercion. Even when exercised in the name of stability, security, or the public good, sovereignty relies on the ability to impose one’s will over others.
This matters for the Internet because sovereignty is increasingly invoked to justify expansive control over online speech, data flows, and digital infrastructure. Laws and policies such as age verification and ID requirements for online conduct are creating the infrastructure of control, enabling the assertion of sovereignty.
One common formulation is the claim: “What is illegal offline should be illegal online.” This argument assumes that online environments simply mirror offline ones. They do not. The argument also implies that the Internet is the Wild Wild West. Various parts of the Internet have been subject to regulation around the world for a long time.
Online speech operates at different scales, with varying amplification effects, audiences, and consequences. Treating online expression as a direct extension of offline conduct has not only led to the over-removal of lawful speech but also to forms of punishment and surveillance that would never be tolerated offline. In practice, sovereignty logic often results in harsher enforcement online than offline.
The appeal to digital sovereignty thus risks replicating, and amplifying, some of the most punitive and human rights-violating legal regimes in existence. Do we really want nation-states to enforce their blasphemy laws on the Internet? But rather than offering individuals greater autonomy or meaningful avenues to escape unjust laws—such as the ability to “vote with their feet” in digital space—this model facilitates the extension of domestic repression across borders and platforms. It mirrors offline coercion online, without accompanying guarantees of political participation, consent, or exit. In doing so, digital sovereignty becomes not a shield against domination but a mechanism for making laws incompatible with human rights more efficiently enforceable in a networked world.
This danger is visible even in well-intentioned calls to reassert state authority over the digital space, including those advanced by prominent defenders of press freedom. These advocates frequently frame disinformation and platform power as threats that require stronger sovereign intervention over online speech and platforms, often invoking the need for democracies to “take back control” of information ecosystems.
Read through Arendt’s lens, however, this response reproduces the very logic that enables repression. By treating sovereign enforcement as the guarantor of truth, safety, or democratic integrity, such proposals collapse political judgment into administrative command and normalize coercive control over speech. In practice, they legitimize over-removal, surveillance, and delegated censorship, while providing ready-made templates for authoritarian regimes to claim the same powers.
What is presented as a defense of democracy thus risks hollowing out the conditions of political freedom itself: plurality, contestation, and shared responsibility. Sovereignty, even when invoked by its most effective advocates, does not correct the structural failures of the digital public sphere; it entrenches them by exporting coercion into the Internet.
The Mirage of Reimagined Sovereignty
Faced with these criticisms, some argue that sovereignty can be reimagined: exercised through multistakeholder institutions, or an alternative to the multistakeholder model, softened into “data sovereignty,” or constrained by procedural safeguards. But this misunderstands the problem. Sovereignty is not merely a technocratic policy tool; it requires authority over others.
As Arendt observed:
“The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which… can be maintained only by the instruments of violence.”
Calling something “multistakeholder sovereignty” (this is an oxymoron anyway) or using the term “data autonomy” instead of “data sovereignty” does not change its function. Nor does invoking sovereignty in the name of vulnerable communities solve the problem. Sovereignty does not create political power through collective action; it reallocates power by authorizing one group to decide for others. It is, by definition, exclusive and will lead to the same problems that the crowd wants to solve: taking away power, autonomy, and collective action.
An Internet Built on Plurality, Not Sovereignty
The sleight of hand is evident in how sovereignty is invoked. Consider the European Council’s framing of digital sovereignty in terms of protecting “our values.” Which values, exactly? And whose? Does every single European share identical values on privacy, security, content moderation, and data governance? This is obviously false.
What “our values” actually means is: the values of those who control the sovereign institutions — the Commission, member state governments, and regulatory bodies. Sovereignty doesn’t protect pluralistic values; it authorizes particular institutions to impose their interpretation of values on everyone else, thereby erasing dissent and difference.
Here is an old-fashioned idea. How about we strengthen the plurality? The Internet cannot be reconciled with sovereignty without fundamentally changing what the Internet is. A sovereign Internet is neither global nor interoperable.
Renouncing sovereignty does not mean abandoning governance, law, or accountability. It means rejecting sovereignty as the organizing principle. The alternative lies in frameworks grounded in plurality: human rights, shared standards, functional jurisdiction, and collective decision-making. These approaches recognize interdependence rather than deny it, and constraint rather than domination.
If the goal is to preserve an Internet that enables access and political participation across borders, sovereignty is not the solution. And continuing to frame Internet governance around it will only accelerate fragmentation at the expense of the people the Internet was meant to serve.
Farzaneh Badiei focuses on digital governance, unfettered access to technology, and human rights. She founded Digital Medusa to push back against tech determinism and defend a global, open, rights-respecting digital space.